[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Absolutely not. In this scenario GM certainly has not forced you to do any particular thing! All that GM has done is make it really really difficult -- but perhaps not quite completely impossible -- to buy from GM. They certainly have not forced you to buy from Ford; there's no GM representative holding a gun to your head saying "buy that Ford or I'll pull the trigger!" As alternatives, you could:

You misunderstood my point. I was only saying "ford" here to represent an 'only existing alternative', not to say that I specifically felt the need to buy American.

I make no claim that the other options are palatable when considered in terms of your overall preferences. I simply observe that they exist.

again, "for all intents and purposes. Emigrating, or paying enormous import tariffs, is not an option I consider in this marvellously interconnected world.

If I lower my prices in SE Asia, how do I ensure that I still make enough sales in the developed world to make ends meet? Won't the inexpensive SE Asian version simply be re-exported to the developed countries? I could lower my prices world-wide, but I'd have to sell many times more units to bring in the same revenue -- 37x more, in my Prague example above. Alternatively, I can decide that "piracy"* in the SE Asian market doesn't matter to me so long as I can make enough revenue in the developed world. Or, I can try to find some other business model.

Piracy will happen anyway. If you make a localized version (with only SE languages supported) I doubt it would be exported much, and it might lower the need to pirate that same stuff.
Not to generalise, but I imagine poor people generally aren't very interested in hearing they're "too poor to be considered as customers". Especially when they're only poor by international standards, all it will do is offend them. Anyway, there are already ways to punish western retailers when they sell cracked software, why would that suddenly not work anymore if they sold a localized version not meant for the local market? I don't really see the conceptual issue here.

I rather expect that most authors have the same attitude. They might still write for fun (and I would certainly still program for fun), but the time and energy available for that activity will be strictly limited by the need to make a living doing some other thing.

Indubitably.

No one in this thread has yet proposed a better model than copyright and monetary payment for managing the competing desires from the above paragraph. I certainly think that the particular implementation of copyright that we have today (in the US) is quite far from achieving its goals as stated in the US Constitution. That's not an indictment of the idea of copyright, but rather of the form it has taken by way of lobbyists and the gang of 535 (a.k.a the US Congress).

One might argue that the idea+revenues pretty much necessarily leads to a lobby, and the requisite drive to stretch the idea until it breaks..

Otherwise I suspect we are mostly in agreement, other than that you're arguing from the perspective of the individual coder/writer/-er, and I'm a bit more interested in the whole chain/system, as well as the legal ramifications of "copyright" taken to extremes.
I doubt your founding fathers would've imagined needing to trade a little liberty for corporate prosperity when they cooked up their version of the relevant laws.